While Barbie and Oppenheimer do battle on the surface this Summer, Meg 2: The Trench has been quietly gobbling up ticket sales in the deep.
The mega-shark sequel from Ben Wheatley took a critical kicking, and has been fairly underwhelming at the domestic box office, but overseas numbers continue to keep the Megalodon swimming forward.
After this past weekend, Meg 2: The Trench has comfortably pushed past the $300 million mark with an impressive $316 million worldwide. Only $66 million of that comes from American markets.
Mega Shark Attack on The Box Office
That still puts it lower than The Meg, which ended on a worldwide haul of $527 million. The point worth making there is it did far better in the US, and the Chinese market was in a healthier state for Western movie releases then.
Meg 2: The Trench has actually bucked the trend of low-performing Western movies in China, and that has contributed to a healthier outlook for the movie than expected. As with the first movie, it is a joint production between US and Chinese companies, so that may have helped it a little.
It quickly went past Insidious: The Red Door to become the highest-grossing genre movie of 2023. It now nearly earned twice the amount that movie did.
Meg 2: The Trench is very loosely based on the Steve Alten novel of the same name, and sees Jason Statham returning as Jonas Taylor, a deep-sea Navy diver defined by his repeated encounters with the supposedly extinct Megalodon shark.
